ABSTRACT
While a graduate student at Stony Brook, the author began a romantic relationship with Gene Weinstein, the sociology professor she had gone to graduate school to study with. One of the many attractions of the relationship was the sociological discussions the author and the professor had around Gene’s kitchen table about social psychology. To stay close to the conditions under which emotional responses are evoked, the researcher must attend to the context-based details and specific conditioned associations. But the analysis is often distracted from details and the role of affect as information because the rhetorical conventions of theoretical discourse overemphasize categorical aspects of interpretation. A theme that occurred often in Final Negotiations involved negotiating hope and reality along with hope and truth telling so that Gene and the author could live the best life possible given the confines of his illness.
